In bluegrass

Music keeps Jerry Kee busy, whether he's engineering it at his home-based Duck-Kee Studio (Superchunk, Kingsbury Manx, and Gerty are just a few of the many bands with which he's worked) or creating it with whatever band has been lucking enough to sign him up as a member. Kee's latest outfit, the feebles, plays self-described "morbid mountain music," and while the foursome uses instrumentation typically associated with traditional and bluegrass music, it'd be inaccurate to assign their debut Uneasy to either of those categories. "Shakedown," for instance, is a rock 'n' roll song that just happens to be driven by banjo and upright bass, and it comes off sounding much more like Violent Femmes than the Brothers Stanley or Louvin. If you need other descriptions to make you feel comfortable, you can add Mark Olson & Victoria Williams in Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers mode and Freakwater in, well, Freakwater mode to the list. But then, the feebles may not want you to be all that comfortable: Theirs is rather unsettling music with, thanks to a fondness for murder ballads, a body count. The feebles play Carrboro's Open Eye Café on Saturday, Dec. 7. Call 968-9410 for details. Rick Cornell